Before he left office, former President Donald Trump completed 450 miles of his border wall at a cost of roughly $15 billion. All that money bought righteous dedication: well-paid construction crews were still blasting through the rugged borderlands—decimating canyons, burying streams, destroying wildlife corridors—on the day incoming President Joe Biden was inaugurated.
And on that day, as promised, Biden ordered a halt to Trump’s debacle. The administration terminated several construction contracts, and returned seized property to landowners in Texas. By June 2021, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Defense (DOD) had closed down all uncompleted border wall projects.
But that’s where the promised reversal of Trump’s project stopped. Now, two years after Biden took office, what remains is a broken landscape, and shrinking hopes for sufficient money and the necessary political will to restore ravaged streams, clean debris-strewn worksites, and mend eroded, unstable hillsides.
Meanwhile, places such as Guadalupe Canyon, where rock walls were simply dynamited away—at a cost of $41 million per mile—remain scarred. Nearly 200 miles to the west, a prominent peak at a spot called Cerro del Fresnal was blown apart, while earthmovers cleared a twenty-meter-wide road at its base. High up on the Coronado National Memorial, a once-stunning viewpoint has been reduced to rubble.
But despite the billions spent inflicting this destruction, the Biden Administration has currently earmarked just $225 million in Homeland Security funds for environmental remediation. Legislation in Congress would also redirect up to $200 million in unspent construction funds towards remediation, but that effort has stalled. “Everybody’s afraid of being seen as soft on border security,” says Dinah Bear, who served for more than two decades as an attorney for the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. As a result, Bear adds, “the administration doesn’t really have the big sums it needs to address massive destruction in places like Guadalupe Canyon.”
Even the funds potentially designated by Congress are considered paltry. Michael Dax is the western program director for Wildlands Network, which conducted an extensive inventory of the damage in southern Arizona, including Guadalupe Canyon and Cerro del Fresnal. If any of those funding measures actually passed, they would still “represent just the beginning of what’s needed to restore the massive amount of damage caused by this reckless project,” he says.
But as political inaction drags on, the clock is ticking for wildlife. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, at least ninety-three threatened and endangered species—from ocelots and jaguars to Mexican gray wolves—may now be closer to extinction because the wall has blocked their migratory routes.
Instead of prioritizing ecological repair, some government agencies appear to be making things worse. DHS, for instance, is closing gaps in the wall that rushed construction crews failed to complete, including one near the Colorado River where migrants are at risk of drowning. However, such gaps also now serve as crucial wildlife crossing points. And the Army Corps of Engineers seems to be skirting Biden’s order—and bucking the opinion of its own engineers—by preparing to build thirteen more miles of border barriers along flood levees on the Rio Grande in Texas. The DHS, however, claims in a 2021 press release that this work is only for repairing structural damage to flood barriers.
In an email to The Progressive, Corps spokesperson Mary Grunert writes that, following the President’s order, the agency “immediately suspended” all border barrier projects, “except for activities related to fixing, maintaining, and making safe the current infrastructure…This work does not involve the construction of [an eighteen-to-thirty-foot] border barrier”—the dimensions of most border barriers. “If not fixed, the compromised levees pose a significant safety risk to 200,000 residents in the affected floodplain in the event of a significant rain event or hurricane.”
“For months, they had been laying out, behind the scenes, how they were going to proceed, regardless of President Biden’s pause.”
Records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Center for Biological Diversity, however, reveal that, in at least one case, the Corps ignored the advice of its own Levee Safety Center, which had concluded that a simple redesign of the drainage system near an old cemetery would suffice. Instead, the agency is converting the earthen levees to concrete walls, and attaching steel bollards on top. Congress has explicitly prohibited the use of federal funds for this type of construction near historic cemeteries.
Behind the scenes, the agency was obviously concerned about appearances. In one memo obtained through the FOIA, a deputy director of Southwest border infrastructure noted that the levee work “will appear like continued construction,” so the agency would need to “message our activities with the media to avoid misrepresentation.” In another memo, staffers noted that their over-engineering efforts could result in “unnecessary attention politically.”
According to critics, this shows a high level of duplicity by the Corps. “For months, they had been laying out, behind the scenes, how they were going to proceed, regardless of President Biden’s pause,” says Paulo Lopes, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “That’s why we are calling it a rogue agency.”
This project also highlights continuing abuses under the Real ID Act. Passed in 2005 during the George W. Bush Administration’s “war on terror,” it gives the Homeland Security secretary sweeping powers to waive environmental reviews normally required for federal projects. While the waiver was invoked five times under Bush, it was used no less than twenty-seven times by the Trump Administration.
Those exemptions have long outraged environmentalists, and members of Congress such as Representative Raul Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, chairperson of the House Natural Resources Committee, who introduced legislation to repeal the Real ID waiver. In 2018, the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity was among several environmental groups that sued the Trump Administration for bypassing twenty-five laws to build twenty miles of border wall in ecologically-rich eastern New Mexico. Two years later, the Center petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the use of waivers, which the organization called unconstitutional.
Among the many problems with these waivers is that they emphasize pell-mell construction, with evaluation of environmental impacts not even an afterthought. As a result, baseline studies of this landscape prior to construction—data that could be used as guidelines for remediation—do not exist. To glean at least some statistics, Wildlands Network has joined another group, Sky Island Alliance, to employ cameras at remote gaps in the fence. “We have strongly suspected that the border wall’s impact on wildlife is significant, but we’re looking forward to being able to quantify that impact,” Dax of the Wildlands Network writes in a followup email. So far, traffic is predictably heavy: in the first month of monitoring, cameras showed at least twenty species of mammals crossing through the gaps.
Now the Wildlands Network is arguing for more large openings in the fence. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB), an agency within the DHS, has countered with a proposal to cut tiny openings instead.
Michael Gregory, an activist who lives in a brush-lined, off-the-grid home just north of the border, scoffs at the CBP’s proposal. “Maybe a jackrabbit could get through those copy-paper sized holes,” he tells The Progressive. “But that’s not going to do anything for the mule deer and the bears and the jaguars.”
Gregory offers a low-tech remedy to this high-priced border barrier: like in nature, he says, let scavengers clean up the mess. “If we just tell people to come take it down, and keep the expensive steel as salvaged goods, that wall would be gone overnight.”